Thoughts on SaneBox

Back in January, I shared I was beginning SaneBox’s free trial period to help get control over my email. As a teacher, I get urgent information from parents all day right next to needless spam. The signal to noise ratio was not where I needed it to be, and I was spending far too much time managing email instead of preparing lessons for my students.

I had heard about SaneBox for years on tech podcasts, but from the descriptions I heard, it sounded mostly like a server side way to snooze email which can be done in native clients such as Spark and Airmail for far cheaper. However, after I returned to using iOS’s default mail app which doesn’t have these features, something had to be done about email. Important things were being buried and forgotten as I was overwhelmed by junk. I decided to give SaneBox a try, and realized very quickly I would be purchasing a subscription.

The killer feature I had no idea about was the SaneLater folder. SaneBox intelligently sorts email for you and decides what should go immediately into your inbox, and what is less important, and can be read later. From day one, it was doing a great job of sorting for me. However, if something ends up in the wrong place, I simply move the email to the inbox, and all future emails from that sender will appear there.

I thought I would forget to check the SaneLater folder, but every day I get a SaneDigest email from SaneBox which tells me how many emails have been placed in my SaneLater folder that day. Generally, I go check it at that time (which I have set as the end of the school day), and spend 5 minutes dealing with it all. I can even wait a few days to manage my SaneLater folder because nothing in there is ever urgent. Meanwhile, important emails from parents of students or my principal go straight to my inbox.

I do have a few custom folders set up for receipts and TestFlight betas, and I use the SaneBlackHole to unsubscribe from emails as well. SaneLater is just the most useful feature for me.

If you’d like to give SaneBox a try, you can click here, which will give you $5 off your initial subscription.